Remember Comet Siding Spring? Mars Orbiter Mission got photos, too

Written by
Emily Lakdawalla
November 19, 2014
Back when I wrote my summary of all the Mars missions' observations of comet Siding Spring, there was one mission that had not yet announced whether or not they'd successfully gathered data: ISRO's Mars Orbiter Mission. Amidst the hoopla over the Philae landing last week, they finally released not one but five images of the comet collected by their Mars Colour Camera:

I'm not exactly sure what, if anything, to take away from these photos. They are not of very high quality, but part of the problem seems to be a severe amount of JPEG compression applied to them before posting -- I assume the original data look somewhat better. The original image (posted on Twitter November 12) included caption information describing the top center image as showing a comet jet, but I'm quite dubious of that interpretation -- it looks like stray light to me, an imaging artifact. I post them here mostly in order to complete the set of Mars mission observations of comet Siding Spring! I look forward to future science meetings where scientists will present and discuss all the Mars spacecraft work on the comet.
Breakthrough research starts with YOU!
Your support will empower the next round of STEP grant winners. Make your gift today to fund tomorrow's promising science and technology projects.
Donate